Two notable honeybee research and honeybee scarcity stories cropped up this week, one just this morning on the AP wire from Garance Burke in Merced, CA, and from Seth Borenstein filing from the DC bureau. They jump on a “quick federal survey” that finds that the past winter delivered another bludgeoning on the nation’s commercial bee industry. It apparently names pesticides, in general and one specifically, as the top suspects along with a slate of other things (mites, viruses, genetic frailty….).

In the four years since a malady quickly dubbed colony collapse disorder hit the news, we learn from one of the AP’s quoted sources, “It’s just gotten so much worse.” The reporting from California’s vast agricultural heart, the Central Valley, found beekeepers in despair over their “livestock,” with the late-winter checking of the somnolent broods find the worker bees not merely sluggish, but dead or absent by the millions.

The pesticide angle, propelled by a recent study in the journal PLoS One and led by Penn State and US Dept. of Ag. researchers, gets good play in the AP. It also does at Science News where in a blog post on Sunday Janet Raloff filed Bees face ‘unprecedented’ pesticide exposures at home and afield. She got the story and the lead for the PLoS study, she reports, while preparing for the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco.

Pronunciation Tip for Reporters Wanting to Sound Like they Know more than they Do:

Anybody covering this  story might well call California almond growers or their trade representatives for comment, as that big industry depends critically on commercial honey bees for pollination. It is, don’t we all know, often a mistake for reporters to adopt the lingo of experts when asking questions if they don’t in fact possess much expertise. The answer might be all  gobbledy-argot-gook.  But just so you know, and as Ms. Burke at the AP certainly does already,  to a California almond grower those nuts are not ALL-munds. They are more like AMM-ens. Really. First syllable rhymes with wham. I learned that decades ago while on assignment in Modesto. And just the other I was at the neighborhood farmers market where a man from near Fresno was selling almonds.  Still call’em AMM-ens down there? , I said nonchalantly, posing to seem possessed of  more inside knowledge than I have. You bet, he said. The lady in line next to me whipped around and exclaimed What! I NEVER heard that before! So she’ll tell somebody else. Eventually maybe almost everybody will know, starting with Berkeley foodies who are already insufferable enough.

Stray question: Are there entomologists who do censuses of feral honey bee colonies? How are they doing?

Grist for the Mill:

PLoS Paper – High Levels of Miticides and Agrochemicals…Honey Bee Health ;

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 at 11:19 am and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories, Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.